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Friday, August 13, 2010

Troeltsch

JD WALTERS SAID:

The claim is that the processes upon which we rely to reconstruct the real past in any other context (such as erosion, sedimentation, meteor craters) arbitrarily break down at a certain point in the past (however many thousand years old YECers claim the Earth and the universe is)...And the stopping point at which the ordinary processes of development break down really is arbitrary... But unlike the past 100 years of history, we are supposed to believe that past a certain arbitrary number of years, history breaks down...

I think Troeltsch was right that the principle of analogy is an indispensable precondition of historical investigation...

Well, that's highly ironic, for nothing could be more arbitrary than Troeltsch's stipulative principle of analogy. Something can be arbitrary on either extreme: arbitrary continuity or arbitrary discontinuity.

1 comment:

The assumption of continuity is not arbitrary, nor is it extreme. It's our default condition, the only way we can get through the day. The burden of proof is very obviously on someone who posits a radical discontinuity in our experience at some point.

An example would be when we are supposed to believe that we can trust our eyes that a real road really does trail off into the distance up to a certain point, after which our perception is generated by an extremely realistic diorama with the illusion of depth, as in my Wiley Coyote example earlier, to which could be added matte paintings used by old Hollywood blockbusters.